“Always Start In English”

If I’m in a club bathroom with a gringo friend talking in English, there will be at least one native who understands our banter and asks where we’re from. In the Duff bathroom I ended up meeting a Chilean who studied in Los Angeles.

“Chilean girls are tough,” I said.

“Do you talk to the girls in English or Spanish?”

“I start off in Spanish. ¿Habla inglés?”

“No no no that’s wrong. Always start in English.”

“They won’t even understand.”

“That’s the point. You need to play up that you’re an outsider right away. At least for the first three minutes speak in English only. It’s different and exciting—they will laugh and enjoy it.”

“Then after three minutes?”

“Start moving into Spanish. By then it won’t matter because you got their attention. Always talk in English first.”

Then I thought back to the night in Santiago with Rodrigo where I started in English by accident and got in pretty well with the group. Even though asking habla inglés already implies that I speak English, I decided that this random bathroom guy knew what he was talking about.

Even though this lesson seems trivial on the surface, at the time I thought it was rather groundbreaking. About a week later I ended up in Cordoba where my entire existence was about getting my Argentine flag. I met another guy there named the Predator whose moves I put in the book are ones that I still use every now and then.

There was no sugar coating or diluting any of the experiences he went through. Stories that some people would take to their grave, Roosh wrote in black and white for the world to read. That’s what made this book so funny but also so intriguing. After some of his stories, you realize he is giving you the full experience and holding nothing back.

“I sat in the front seat and the chubby girl got on my lap. I positioned her body in a way that much of her weight was against the door instead of crushing my body.”

While I was reading this book, I was doing a little bit of traveling of my own. I was up in Maine at one point, staying in this vacation cabin with a girl. One night while she was getting ready for bed I was reading through a few chapters and I began laughing. Imagining how some of this stuff went down, I was reading it out loud. She kept wanting me to read more of it.

An important part of any book is its diction, and on this front, A Dead Bat in Paraguay is as smooth and pleasing to read as a good wine is to drink. An acolyte of the Hemingway school of literary writing, Roosh shies away from flowery descriptions and overblown metaphors, relaying his story with an understatement that conveys imagery and emotion in its own way. His bone-dry sense of humor pervades his prose at almost all times, with lines like “I made love with the toilet.” Roosh is awfully fond of toilet humor in the literal sense – a lot of the laughs come from his loving descriptions of the painful, explosive bowel movements he had while on the road. No mere clown, though, he also retells the struggles of his journey with a bluntness that gets the reader invested emotionally. A large part of the narrative is Roosh’s attempts to hook up with the local women in the various places he visits, only to be met with repeated failure. His constant battle to adapt his game to the cultural idiosyncrasies of the women who he tries to bed is so compelling that when he finally meets success, you’ll want to cheer.

The frankness and honesty of A Dead Bat in Paraguay is a refreshing change from the fake, phony, and fraudulent memoirs that have flooded the book world in recent years, but it also hurts the book in some ways. Any good storyteller has the ability to bullshit with aplomb, and Roosh isn’t quite there yet. His emphasis on relaying the details of his trip has too much of a “just the facts, ma’am” feel to it, as if he was writing a college paper and not a commercial book. The weakness of this approach culminates in the book’s ending, which just sucks. In fact, it isn’t really an “ending” – the book just sort of stops.

In pointing out these issues, I don’t want come off as being too critical. In a literary world full of flotsam, jetsam, and other varieties of garbage, Roosh Vörek has produced something remarkable and memorable.

And a short one from a reader:

Just finished your book. Thought it was great. I cannot give you a good review that you are able to post because it would suck if I even tried, but I really appreciated the book, and I am proud to have it on my bookshelf now. I’ve always liked how you tell it how it is and how you are completely honest with yourself. You’ve been inspiring for awhile and that book made you even more. Thanks for everything.

I thank these guys for their reviews.

You can learn more about getting a copy at the A Dead Bat In Paraguay homepage. Also if you go to buy the ebook version of one of my books, I offer my other one at a pretty nice discount, kind of like when you go to the movie theater and they ask if you want to upgrade your beverage size for 40 cents more.

Someone emailed to ask me if I was writing a sequel to DBIP, and the answer is a definite no. Not only do I not want to touch memoir writing for a while, but the past seven months have been enjoyable without the violent ups and downs that would make a good story. A book about me generally getting what I want from life wouldn’t be very compelling. I may put out a brief epilogue though after I return to Rio.